Christine Mitton and Marty Bourgeois during the sneak peak of the play God of Carnage.

Starting from our first meeting in the spring, I documented our  new theatre company’s development right up until the cast party. I did other things within the company, some fun, some not, but using photographs to promote the project as well as to document it and make it real, was the most satisfying.

Starting anything new is chaotic. We more or less had the elements we needed. We had actors and comedians, a director, a photographer, writers and a set designer. We had lots of willingness to work and work hard. But this was a new company with no home, no credibility. We were going entirely on the desire to put on a play.

However,  we didn’t want to put on a play and have no one come. At our worst moments, we feared it might be our fate, especially when the stage in the untried venue we chose was a long time getting built.

The venue was an old car dealership turned into arts and crafts studios and a gallery. At our first visit the owner could only point out where the stage would go, where the audience would be sitting — where the washrooms would be. (The stage happened; the washrooms didn’t. Our audience had to use the mechanics’ washroom from the dealership days. No one complained loudly.)

Epiphany of the Obvious One

On opening night a full house happened, and then another one the next night, but at the postmortem meeting the actors complained about all that work for only two shows. At least one actor said he thought the play would have hit its stride by the third show and then came the first epiphany for me. Actors like acting.

Me, I hoped that everything would be ready on time and after two nights without a disaster we could claim victory. The actors, though, wanted to act, and act again and again. They wanted a full house so they could act in front of a lot of people. They wanted several nights to act out the same play and feed off different audiences, different energies and discover how that interacted with their acting.

Epiphany of the Obvious Two

And that’s where epiphany two comes in, namely, why I think they liked the photos I took of them. The photos were the next best thing to acting.

Most of the photos I took were of them working, either reading scripts, discussing scenes, or just plain acting. Once I knew the script, I could anticipate better and capture the actors at those distinct moments when they were delivering a great line or were displaying a particular mood. And that made them happy. The photos caught them acting and I put them on display for others to see. Having an audience is everything to an actor.

Living Colour at Last

Janet Coates and Neal Mundle in God of Carnage, Red Necklace Productions' first play

The second reason was to avoid a lot of colours clashing. Most of the rehearsals were not in ideal conditions. We didn’t have the right furniture; we lost our first rehearsal site; we couldn’t have the actual complete set until the week of the play. When we could rehearse in the venue, there was so much artwork around that monochrome processing and close cropping were the only things that kept it all from dominating the photos.

When we finally had the set on the stage, the lights set up and the actors’ costumes finalized, I felt free to photograph in colour and one couldn’t tell rehearsal photos from the real performance. And the actors were ecstatic that their work was finally being represented accurately. Anybody who went to our Red Necklace Productions Facebook page could see these four people as actors acting.

So, of all the lessons I learned over the months of this production, the most important one is to jump right in and take photos of the actors doing their acting because for them, the more they have an audience, the happier they are.

Photo processing on the desktop seems serious: industry standard software, large images, big monitors. An iPhone is fun. You can play with it anywhere and be influenced by anyone and anything including your neighbour’s dog. Or your neighbour. 

I shot the above photo sitting on the front step after a run, then ran it through CrossProcess and then a couple of times through PicGrunger and then SquareReady. I did some other tinkering but this isn’t a tutorial. This is about moving away from the laptop for a while to learn a different, more immediate kind of photography.
I didn’t do it all on the front step.

In fact, I don’t remember where I did the rest, but that’s the point. It could have been anywhere: waiting in line at Tim Horton’s, on the porch of the cottage, in the park, in the dark, on the toilet.

Some people text constantly in every nook and cranny of their day: me, I’ve started to photo process. And that’s the other odd metamorphosis: I’ve started to want to share my images, to become part of a community, to like a lot of people’s creations. I want to connect with the other people who are out snapping photos like crazy and processing them on the spot.

And I’m not interested in how people make their images. I’m more interested in the story of the photo, in the where and the who and the then what.

Photography has suddenly become more a part of the world as it is right this moment.

Five Topics

There are five topics I will blog about:
Writing — including reference apps and sites, as well as proofreading and editing
Photography — there is a lot to learn to get beyond mere cellphone photos
Workflow — being productive means knowing your tools and how to make them work together
Video — producing good video with specialized equipment is tough enough; doing it with an iPhone is a real challenge
Mindset — when book production went from hand copying to the printing press, a mental revolution was set off. This is similar.

So this series will be about how do to go from a desktop process to a tool that’s about the size of a deck of cards.

Why Do It?

There are some practical reasons.
Credibility: If most people are consuming this on smart phones, then it makes sense that I can get closer to them if I produce it on one. I think people respond to peer-to-peer relationships.
Convenience: What could be more convenient than carrying all your tools in a 4.5 X 2.3 inch device. It’s like owning Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver.
Inevitability: Small and connected is where everything is going.
Fun: Did I have to point that out?

Everybody seemed to have fun posing with my yellow shirt. It's convinced me that fundraising show give back something, even if it's just a little fun.

There are two approaches  to fundraising that I can think of: one is to come up with an angle so compelling that people pull out their wallets with a sense of urgency; the other is to think of an activity that is just too much fun to pass up. For my first campaign, I’ve chosen the latter. and judging from the photos, I think I’m succeeding.

Fundraising for a good cause should make both giver and receiver feel good. One shouldn’t give out of sense of guilt, nor should you feel you’re begging by asking.

But it is up to the fundraiser to make it a good experience. I don’t want people to avoid me when I come around. What I want is for them to be curious as hell as to what I’m up to this time.

Now, less than a month to the Moncton Youth Residences’ QUEST for 5 run/walk and to date I have 24 people photographed with my yellow shirt on. I haven’t been refused yet and this is good for my spirit. Sure, I’m only asking for $2 to sign my shirt, but even that can be annoying when it’s for tickets on something you don’t want or never expect to win.

The cost of the campaign has been minimal: some gas money, the shirt, and the fabric markers. But lots of time. Lots of time.

Sara Jean knew exactly how she wanted to pose. I caught her during a break in a team meeting.

I’ve spent a lot of time getting the photos right, drawing on all my photography and Photoshop skills to make people happy to see themselves online. And I’ve spent lots of time getting the captions right so it shows I noticed them. That’s probably more difficult than the photography.

It’s not hard to see if someone looks good; but to say something that’s personal and non-trivial requires that you know something about the person. Yet some of the people I’ve only just met so I have to pay particular attention to remember something from a 30 second shoot. That’s where lots of photos comes in.

A subject’s reaction to my rapid-fire photography usually catches them off guard enough to get an authentic and therefore unique reaction. And a solid 10 photos or so usually gives me enough story to write something about them that is directly related to the moment we shared. And so far I’ve come up with something about everyone. None of the captions has been particularly insightful, but all of them have shown my supporters that they’re more than just a source of $2.

I don’t like making rookie gaffs in anything and I especially don’t like doing it in social media for a client. But I don’t want to be seized with doubt about everything I post, either. So I’m practicing on my friends. And, amazingly enough, I still have some.

If you want to see what I’m practicing with, go to my Facebook page.  I have signed up for a charity run for youth and my goal is to make $1,000 from micro-donations of $2.

Supporters give me a twoonie (I’m Canadian. A “twoonie” is a $2 coin.) and then they sign my shirt. I then tell them to do something with the shirt — put it on, wrap it around their head, whatever moves them — and I take a picture for my page.

My actual fundraising is almost entirely an in-person micro-giving ($2) campaign. The social media part is trying to reward my supporters with fun, flattering, high quality photos of them on my page and on Twitter with captions and comments that show I value them  and I am grateful.

I put a printout of my Facebook page on my pledge book and, so far, at least one person grabbed it to find the page online.

So far, almost everyone seems to be having fun participating. It’s different. It’s personal. It’s a really yellow shirt (I call it double-yellow). The main lesson I’ve learned so far is that just because it’s online social media, doesn’t mean I can figure it out without connecting with people physically.

For me to have any confidence that my work isn’t just pissing people off, I need to look a good many of them in the eye before and after I post their photos. I need to know what it takes to get them to trust me and to be glad they did.

What I’m finding, though, is that in the process of all this caring, I’m getting supercharged by the connections. Coming home and seeing a couple more Like’s, a retweet or two, watching people smile while they try to do something imaginative with the yellowest shirt ever, that’s  what encourages me to keep going.

By the way, this is me. It took me a long time to make. My wife helped with suggestions. I made the hat.

So, what’s with the sock puppets? Sock puppets, like banjos, are a running gag. Can coaxing coworkers to make sock puppet self-portraits of themselves for the agency newsletter create community? Or is it just going to get us lynched?

I’m sure we can get away with pulling people’s socks off, gluing some hair on them (the socks), some googly eyes, and maybe throwing in a tiara or two and then have them pose with their doppelgänger for everyone to laugh at. But where is the community building in that?

It’s a leveller, for sure, like that satanic activity called the “chicken dance” that workshop facilitators insist on inflicting on participants in the name of “breaking the ice.” But it’s more than that.

Two Campaigns

This is our third fun feature for our agency newsletter, the first being People and Their Pets and the second being When We were Young. The first was fun because people always enjoy showing off their favourite creature. The second I found touching, seeing all those little kids we once were. Some were sweet, some had talents we didn’t suspect they had, some were endearing four-year-olds with big sunglasses, and all had big innocent smiles.
But so what? How did community happen?

How Community Happens

A community can be just a group of people who share some psychological space, but community building, among other things, is usually about getting members to value one another more. In our case, I believe it happened in the coaxing for the pictures. We sent out memos and we informed program coordinators and we got some response that way, but the real participation didn’t happen until we started to connect with people individually and tell them we wanted to see photos of their pets or photos of  themselves as children.

The pet campaign almost didn’t happen but was rescued by a gregarious coworker with a smart phone who just started calling everyone she knew in the agency. The second campaign was looking sad too until I followed my coworker’s example but went one further and went out of my way to look people in the eye and say, “We want to see you when you were little.” Other newsletter committee members did the same. We had great participation and great reader response. It was the most popular issue yet.

We Value You

The critical point is that someone went out of their way to say, “We value you.” Memos did it for a couple of people, word of mouth for a couple of more, but someone telling them personally is what worked far better. And the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the photos from the rest of the agency proved to them we were right. The rest of the agency was delighted with what the participants had shared.

Now, making sock puppets will be more work than just tracking down an old photo — a lot more work — and we will have to stand in front of more people convincing them that others really want to see these, but it’s in that work of connecting personally that community is being built. That’s the big deal about sock puppets.